​Blog

Have positive mindset even when it gets hard. Before you start typing, it’s crucial to get yourself into the right mindset. You may be experiencing feelings of anxious, feeling as though you don’t have enough time and you can’t do it. You may feel defeated before you’ve even begun. To be successful, however, you will need to kill these negative feelings. It’s vital to be positive, to try to resolve the challenge, and to adopt a ‘can-do’ attitude. If it helps, think of it as a battle that you’re going to win. Give yourself some personal time, and keep the end goal in mind: you’re going to do your best and surprise your teacher. You’re going to prove to yourself that you can take on this task, enjoy it, and write the assignment in record time. Take a deep breath, remain calm, and start to attack the work systematically and logically.

2. Turn off your phone and social networksThe last thing you need when you only have a few hours to write an essay is to get distracted by your mobile or social networks, which have a habit of wasting your time without you even realizing. Procrastination isn’t an option at this late stage, so it’s time to ban yourself from your phone, social network and anything else you think might distract you. Sit somewhere cosy and put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. If it helps, install a full-screen text editor onto your computer, such as Darkroom, or just turn it off, to force yourself to look at your essay and only your essay.

3. Read the question carefullyWhen you’re in a rush, it can be simple to skim over the question and think you’ve understood it – only for you to realise, after writing most of the essay, that you got the wrong end of the stick and it’s too late to amend it. This is particularly hazardous when you’re under pressure, because your brain has a tendency to see what it wants to see; it may tell you that the title is asking a question that you want to answer, while the reality might be subtly but dangerously different. So, start by reading the question very carefully and ensuring you’ve clearly understood what it’s asking you to do. If it helps, highlight key instructional words in the title, such as “argue” or “define”. This helps your mind to focus on the right kind of task, so you write the essay with this in mind.

4. Get your books ready

Getting your books ready in advance can speed things up a lot. Prepare your study table by opening the books you’ll need to use on relevant pages, or putting sticky notes in them to mark where relevant information is. This means you won’t have to keep burning precious time searching through multiple books to find the information each time you need to refer to it.

6. Sum up your argument in a sentence

To get yourself thinking clearly about what you’re going to be writing, see if you can conclude what your argument is going to be in a single sentence. If you can’t do this, it means that you don’t quite know what you want to say, with the result that you may end up flopping in your essay, thereby wasting precious time. It’s important to set out with a clear idea of what your argument is, because then everything you write next will be working towards the goal of getting your argument across. Of course, don’t spend too long on this and end up with not enough time to write the main essay!

7. Write your notes directly into the document

Don’t fiddle around with multiple documents when you’re in a hurry. When you’re in a hurry, your notes can double up as an essay, killing two birds with one stone. Start by typing your essay notes directly into the document you’ve created for your essay. This could be bullet points or summaries of what you want to write in each paragraph. For each point, also include a liner or two on what references you’re going to use in support. Once you’ve done this, arrange the notes into a logical structure by dragging and dropping paragraphs into an order you think works. This becomes your detailed essay plan.

8.Then rewrite your notes into an essay with an argumentYou now have the structure of your assignment in note form. You can now turn your handy notes into an essay by rewriting them into academic structure, complete with ‘filler’ sentences that glue it all together and help build your argument.

9. Save the introduction and conclusion for lastYou’ll do a better job of the introduction and conclusion when you know the direction of the essay. Surprisingly, the introduction and conclusion of an essay are often the least easy bits to write. So, save these for last. By the time you’ve written the main parts of the essay, the task of writing the introduction and coming up with a conclusion should be much easier, as you’ll already have spent plenty of time on your argument and you’ll be very familiar with it.